The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening

Summary

Discover the Essence of Who You Really Are

These powerful meditations and poetic reflections will comfort, inspire, and gently bring you out of the hectic day-to-day and back to the bedrock of peace, and even joy, of your true, essential, and authentic self. By encouraging you to see the limitations of your everyday, conditioned personality, Steve Taylor empowers you to step outside of it so you can breathe the fresh air of freedom. His words will guide you on a journey through the landscape of wider awareness, pointing out the obstacles and landmarks along the way to enlightenment. A profound modern spiritual text with the power to transmit awakening, The Calm Center will help you open to the deepest and highest experiences of a life fully lived.

Related Articles

Book Preview

The Calm Center - Steve Taylor

Reviews

Author

Introduction

How religious you are depends on the nature and strength of your beliefs and how deeply you are self-identified with them. How spiritual you are depends on your degree of presence in everyday life, which is to say your state of consciousness.

The essence of all spirituality is presence, a state of consciousness that transcends thinking. There is a space behind and in between your thoughts and emotions. When you become aware of that space, you are present, and you realize that your personal history, which consists of thought, is not your true identity and is not the essence of who you are. What is that space, that inner spaciousness? It is stillness, the calm center. It is pure consciousness, the transcendent I AM that becomes aware of itself. The Buddha called it sunyata, emptiness. It is the kingdom of heaven that Jesus pointed to, which is within you, here and now.

As presence increasingly arises within you, it manifests in many different ways: inner peace, empathy, an outflow of goodwill toward your fellow human beings, creativity, a heightened sense of aliveness, freedom from dysfunctional and compulsive thinking, a deep appreciation of the present moment. All these shifts and many other changes greatly enhance the quality of your life.

Presence can also empower and inspire the spoken and written word. All true spiritual teachings use words as pointers toward that transcendent dimension of consciousness that is presence. In some mysterious way, the words that arise out of presence are imbued with a certain power that goes beyond their informational value and is reflective of presence. That power can awaken or deepen the presence in those people who listen to or read those words. All true spiritual books have that power. You can, and indeed will want to, return to and reread them many times, because a certain shift in consciousness happens within you as you read. You enter the state of presence.

The Calm Center is one of those rare books. It belongs to the genre of poetry, which has been recognized since ancient times as a highly appropriate medium for the expression and transmission of spiritual truth. Many ancient scriptures can be considered either as poetry or as existing on the borderline between poetry and prose. The Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, and the Tao Te Ching are all poetic in nature. In these texts, meaning, images, sound, and rhythm interact to create a harmonious whole whose transformative power is activated in the consciousness of the reader or listener. Then there are the great mystical poets of Sufism, such as Hafiz, Rumi, Kabir, and Attar; and the Buddhist poets Basho and Milarepa. In the Christian tradition also there are great mystical poets, such as St. John of the Cross, Angelus Silesius, and of course Meister Eckhart, whose writings, with their masterful use of images and metaphors, could be described as poetic prose. In more recent times, the spiritual dimension is present in the works of numerous poets, such as Wordsworth, Whitman, Rilke, and many